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People who come to their calling after being in another line of work tend to cling to it all the more fervently and work at it all the more relentlessly; they express gratitude for a second chance by way of unflagging exertion. Frederick Wiseman, who died yesterday, at the age of ninety-six, is one such latecomer. Having started out in law, he made his first feature at thirty-six and thereby launched a second career, and, judging from his ample filmography, he did more than make up for lost time—he lapped it. Between 1967 and 2023, he made forty-seven features (nearly one a year), many of them running considerably more than two hours. His body of work, considered in terms of number of features and of total running time, is one that probably no one in his generation or younger can match. More important, he fused his life and his work more totally and more essentially—if also more elusively—than did any of his American contemporaries.

In 1963, Wiseman, a law professor at Boston University with an interest in movies, produced “The Cool World,” an independent feature directed by Shirley Clarke. He was so dissatisfied with the process that he realized that he, too, could—and, indeed, should—direct. (One of the marks of greatness is to take only what one needs; Clarke’s film is actually original and engrossing, but Wiseman needed to push it aside in order to clear his own path.) He wanted his law students to learn experientially, to visit places and witness activities related to the legal process. So that his students could observe the consequences of law enforcement and the ways that it might affect their future clients, he brought them to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; then he filmed a documentary there. That film, “Titicut Follies,” completed in 1967, reveals the harsh conditions that patients endured, and holds up the state’s medical and legal complex to scrutiny. It was banned by a Massachusetts judge on grounds that Wiseman considered a pretext for censorship.

Wiseman’s response was to dig ever deeper into coercive social forces. He planned a series of films on institutions and their official exertion of power—whether by law or knowledge, by physical discipline or administrative abstractions. The distinctive scope and focus of his rapidly growing œuvre can be seen in these films’ titles, which, by 1971, included “High School,” “Hospital,” “Law and Order,” and “Basic Training.”

The story of Wiseman’s filmmaking career is itself a Wiseman-like subject, a story of a sort that he could have told on film (and which he freely discussed in interviews, including with me). Quantity, of course, matters less than quality; Wiseman’s universe is one of the most distinctively personal ones that the American cinema has to offer, and it’s unified by a tightly bound set of ideas, styles, and methods. That fact is all the more extraordinary because all but three of his films are—may he forgive me, I was about to use the word “documentaries,” which he disliked—works of nonfiction, which he managed to turn into a form of quasi-literary exploration. Quantity and quality are connected nonetheless: the very extensiveness of Wiseman’s cinematic world (along with its intensiveness) is one of the most personal aspects of his work. Wiseman came to view the concept of an institution broadly—not only the closed spaces, early in his career, of a research facility (“Primate”), a military facility (“Missile”), and a city office (“Welfare”) but also a series of interlocking institutions unified by a theme (“Domestic Violence”), a neighborhood (“In Jackson Heights”), a town (“Monrovia, Indiana”).

His work depended on access. He filmed in hospital rooms where patients and families faced incommensurable agonies with the aid of the medical staff (“Near Death”); he filmed in administrative offices (“At Berkeley,” “Ex Libris”), in businesses (“The Store,” “Model”), in government buildings (“City Hall”). Yet people tended to speak uninhibitedly in his presence. He told me that they simply forgot he was filming there. It helps that Wiseman was slight of stature and calm of manner. It’s hard to imagine him passing unnoticed if he’d had the height and the bearing of Charlton Heston.

It’s also hard to imagine Wiseman having started a similar career a decade sooner, because his films depended, to a significant extent, on a new technology that had begun to reveal its power—a system that allowed a lightweight tape recorder and a relatively lightweight movie camera to synch up, with no cable connecting them. Such equipment proved its artistic importance in 1960, with Robert Drew’s “Primary” and, in France, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer”—the early generation of films in the format called cinéma vérité, or direct cinema. Wiseman said he was inspired by Drew’s 1961 documentary “Mooney vs. Fowle,” a chronicle of a high-school-football championship game. When Wiseman got started, it was in a new field that, although burgeoning, seemed both wide open and unformed. He took hold of a still-young format and, guided from the start by an unyielding sense of principle, made a body of work so original, idea rich, and unified that it seems foreordained—a historic fusion of investigation and the inner life.

Wiseman brought intellectual form to nonfiction through the single word “institutions,” a concept that carried the philosophical heft of the contemporaneous work of Michel Foucault; Wiseman similarly probed the intersections of systems of knowledge and power, and drew attention to the physical authority that ultimately backs up the abstract determinations of administrative rules. Where Foucault exhumed a hidden historical archive, Wiseman created a new one, in real time. He also created an institution of his own, Zipporah Films, to distribute his work. (Founded in 1971, it was named for his wife, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, who was also a law professor; she died in 2021.)

He was a true independent whose method was as rigorous and as singular as his intellectual focus. On location, he worked with a spare crew comprising a cinematographer (from 1980 to 2020, John Davey) and a camera assistant; Wiseman himself carried the tape recorder and wielded the microphone until, for his last documentary, “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” from 2023, he could no longer do so.

As the literal bearer and the first hearer of his films’ sound, Wiseman was also the immediate receiver of the subjects’ discourse in its most concentrated form, on headphones, and his material relationship to these voices is embodied in the work. Much of the action is in the form of talking, which the incisively analytical images parse with the emotional precision of dramatic stagings, lending the talk a sort of emphatic onscreen incarnation. Filming with his ears and listening visually, Wiseman constructed mighty grids of connections and implications, long-term dramas on vast architectural frameworks as if they were cinematic operas. “Welfare” feels both colossal and brisk at two and three-quarter hours; “Central Park” is nearly three; “La Comédie-Française” approaches four; “Menus-Plaisirs” hits four; “Belfast, Maine,” “At Berkeley,” and “City Hall” exceed four. “Near Death” (which I consider a supreme masterwork, alongside “Welfare” and “In Jackson Heights” and the early, more journalistic “Hospital” and “Law and Order”) runs two minutes short of six hours.

Neither the dramatic element nor the operatic scope should come as a surprise after a glance at the fuller range of Wiseman’s activities. He was indeed fascinated by theatre and dance, filming the former (in the Comédie-Française film) and the latter (in “Ballet,” “Crazy Horse,” and even “Boxing Gym”)—and also directing a batch of stage productions, from 1988 to 2012 (including an adaptation for opera of his film “Welfare”). He foregrounded the personalities and presences of his films’ subjects with as keen a conception of performance as any director of scripted movies could boast—and he carried that sensibility over to his direction of three fiction films, most recently, “A Couple,” based on writings by Sophia Tolstoy, the novelist’s wife. Wiseman filmed it months after the death of Zipporah, and it’s both an agonizing tribute to an artist’s long-suffering wife and yet another of the director’s unsparing analyses of an institution: marriage.

In his nonfictions, Wiseman was just as much of a personal filmmaker. The first-person adventure of his career is both in the depth of individual films and in the expanse of places, people, institutions, and historical phenomena that he explored. Cinéma vérité is an immersive form of filmmaking which, for some filmmakers, has meant self-questioning reflexivity, and, for others, has meant onscreen participation with subjects. For Wiseman, who doesn’t appear in his nonfictions and doesn’t conduct interviews, the format meant something different altogether. It was an intellectual engagement—a virtual presence achieved in the choice of what to film, how to film it, and what to include in the edit—which produced a paradox: total creativity involving activities that he had no hand in creating. With these films, Wiseman looks passionately at the activities at hand, widely at their vast implications, and deeply into himself. The greatness of his work isn’t only in its documentation of extraordinary events but in the fervor with which Wiseman himself experiences them. As much as with any director of the most intimate personal fictions, Wiseman’s nonfictions could be laid end to end and viewed in continuity, like the story of an extraordinary life. ♦

During the past several weeks, I have been making the argument that progressive movements in America need to strengthen their connection to communities of faith and center their work in the church, as earlier progressive movements have done. In the past decade, millions of Americans have taken to the streets on behalf of social justice, but this has not led to much in the way of real change. The accomplishments of the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and of the Sanctuary Movement in the eighties depended, in part, on the infrastructure, moral clarity, and greater purpose of the church.

But this argument raises a question that I haven’t addressed. If it’s true that those earlier movements drew inspiration and leadership from the church, and if it’s also true that young liberals are increasingly secular, then where does that progressive energy come from? Why do young people participate in politics today, either through voting or through protest, in high numbers? What institution taught them a sense of morality, gave them words to express their outrage, and offered them the space and infrastructure to imagine a different world?

The answer is obvious: the university. In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people. This isn’t an entirely new development, of course—American history is full of student-protest movements—but, rather, a consolidation of the university’s influence. Young people not only stopped going to church in large numbers, they also got fewer and fewer union jobs—and unions were the other institution in America that has historically produced a great deal of progressive change. College, particularly for middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, is now often the first and perhaps only place where young people are told that they are part of a community of their choosing, one that will prepare them to be “leaders of tomorrow” and instill in them a moral and ethical code of conduct.

So, if we accept that the university has become the incubator for social-justice movements in America, is it actually good at this job?

I began thinking about this question while reading about the effects of education on political polarization. It’s a familiar story by now: the more years of education you’ve received, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. In the past few election cycles, this correlation has become more robust. A number of conservative commentators, including Roger Kimball, Peter Wood, and Chris Rufo, maintain that political conformity overtook élite institutions of higher learning and turned every seminar room into some radical struggle session where students dutifully read Karl Marx and bell hooks. Even if you disagree, as I do, with their prescriptions to root out so-called radicalism wherever they find it, you can recognize that what they’re describing is not imaginary. In 1969, around the height of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Third World Liberation Front movement on campuses, the faculty at American universities were closer in political alignment to the general public. This held true until the end of the century, when a combination of factors—including the expansion of the social sciences, which tend to attract more liberals—led to the left-leaning academy that you see today. The extreme effects of this shift have been especially visible at élite universities; according to one conservative group’s report, seventy-seven per cent of faculty at Yale, for example, are or have largely supported Democrats, compared with just three per cent who are Republicans. But most forms of higher education have seen at least a doubling of its liberal-to-conservative gap since the nineties.

Wood argues that colleges are not only staffed with a disproportionate number of radicals who indoctrinate the students but also have turned everything from dormitory management to the dining halls over to the left. In this view, even students who might disagree with their radical professors will eventually succumb to progressive politics because it is embedded in every part of campus life. Wood and others—such as John McWhorter, who, in his book “Woke Racism,” contends that “wokeness” has become a religion on college campuses—understand that the contemporary university functions in some respects as a church, and they believe that it has taken up a dangerous and wrongheaded set of doctrines. (Wood co-authored a three-hundred-and-seventy-page study on my alma mater, Bowdoin College, because he believed that the school had become hostile to the teachings of Western civilization.) These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university so much as they want to swap out the sermons.

I would argue something more fundamental. Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs, we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all. To answer the question posed at the start of this column: the university is not good at incubating social-justice movements, or acting as a moral and ethical center of our culture. This is not only because its priests are mostly cloistered faculty but because not everyone goes to college, and many of those who do attend community colleges and commuter schools that do not play this role. The élite public and private universities are intentionally exclusionary, which is why seemingly every one of their commencement speakers talks about the assembled, in their caps and gowns, as the future leaders of America and the best of the best. The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.

This underlying contradiction doesn’t mean that students don’t care about all the suffering in the world, nor does it disqualify their dissent. But it does sometimes limit their moral scope. While studying campus movements such as the Third World Liberation Front of the late sixties and early seventies, I was struck by how many of their demands were about college life. This was, on one level, pragmatic—college students at San Francisco State and Berkeley might not be able to stop American imperialism, but they could at least force their universities to create ethnic-studies departments and change some of their admissions practices, at least at the margins. The anti-apartheid movements of the eighties decried the racism of the South African system, but mainly demanded changes in how specific universities managed their investments.

From one perspective, these localized approaches are laudable: young people have concentrated on what they can actually change while remaining committed to larger, worthy political causes. But what we end up seeing, often, is a version of what the writer Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” in which a well-intentioned, liberatory idea gets rerouted into litigating disputes among the culturally and economically wealthy. This capture doesn’t necessarily take place at the site of protest, when angry people gather in a public square, but in the processing of the event through the media, the academy, and the political system—institutions that are overwhelmingly made up of élite college graduates. Five and a half years ago, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities. But, once everyone went home, the abiding changes took place mostly in corporate H.R. departments and in the academy. Those who left their homes to protest the murder of George Floyd weren’t secretly focussed on the diversity statistics at Bank of America or on the faculty lounge at Wesleyan University, but that moment of mass dissent got processed through the media, the government, and corporate America. If so many modern protest movements produce such results, is it because the church of the university teaches you to resolve disputes internally without truly disrupting its hierarchy?

I won’t pretend to know the answer, but I am convinced that we should deëmphasize the university’s role in our moral life. This doesn’t mean that professors need to become bots who hand out information stripped clean of any political valence, nor does it mean that colleges must hire more faculty who will tout the virtues of Western civilization. Rather, we must unlearn the idea that the moral fate of the country depends on what a handful of kids at élite colleges learn in their classrooms. As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed? Education polarization can be best understood as a quasi-religious conflict: people on both sides of the divide do not really believe that they share the same values, morals, or sense of community. And why would they? When “church” costs upward of a hundred thousand dollars a year to attend, how do you sell its sermon to the masses? ♦

One morning last month, a Minneapolis resident, whom I’ll call Anna, was pulling into the parking lot at work when she noticed a fleet of dark, unmarked S.U.V.s idling nearby. A group of immigration agents dressed in street clothes emerged from the vehicles before she could get out of her car. One of them called her by her name. “I know who you are,” he said. “I know you’re a refugee.”

Anna’s first thought was to explain that there was some mistake. “I wasn’t afraid,” she later told me. At the end of 2024, she and her family, including her four children, who are from a country in Central Africa, were granted refugee status in the U.S. The federal government had resettled them in Minnesota, a state which they found cold and strange but mercifully quiet. Her immigration papers, which she always carried with her, were in order. “I thought I was going to talk to the man and show him my documents,” Anna said. Instead, as soon as she opened her car door, he put her in handcuffs.

For the next several hours, Anna sat in a room at a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, forbidden from calling her family or a lawyer. No one told her what was happening. At around eleven that night, wearing shackles around her wrists and ankles, she was put on a plane and flown to an immigration jail in Texas. Outside the cell where she would spend the next five days was a makeshift sign that read “USCIS Cases.”

Anna knew the abbreviation: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was the government agency to which she’d been submitting her legal documents. Since its creation, in 2002, U.S.C.I.S. has been the lone immigration agency at the Department of Homeland Security that doesn’t make arrests or participate in enforcement sweeps. Unlike the armed agents of ICE and Border Patrol, the roughly twenty thousand officials at U.S.C.I.S., none of whom have traditionally carried weapons, primarily act as administrators of the legal-immigration system. Almost all of the agency’s budget is funded by fees paid by immigrants applying for visas, residency status, and benefits. The applicants are often referred to as “customers” by agency staff. At U.S.C.I.S., one former official told me, “We were seen as the friendly, supportive side—the agency that tried to help people.”

Even as Donald Trump has turned the agencies of D.H.S. into something of a roving personal police force, his Administration has prosecuted a quieter but no less ambitious assault on legal immigration. Green cards and visas for people from dozens of countries have been frozen indefinitely, and the Administration has cancelled naturalization ceremonies. Immigrants and asylum seekers in the middle of the application process have been detained during routine interviews. Last April, Mohsen Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who had a green card, was arrested during his citizenship interview, for which he’d waited a decade. “Is this a trap?” he recalled thinking, after U.S.C.I.S. called him in for an appointment; masked ICE agents took him away just after he’d signed the Pledge of Allegiance. The wife of a green-card applicant who was arrested in Salt Lake City said, “We’ve tried to do everything the right way. We have, and [now] he’s not here.”

In July, leadership at U.S.C.I.S. announced that the agency’s staff would soon have the power to make arrests and carry guns. New job postings no longer emphasized the provision of government services, but instead began advertising positions called Homeland Defenders, with responsibilities such as “defend your culture.” “It’s astonishing how swiftly the agency has shifted,” the former staffer told me. After Trump leaves office, another said, “there’s going to be some kind of bureaucratic husk called U.S.C.I.S., but that entity won’t have the ability to adjudicate requests for immigration benefits.”

By the start of the year, the Administration’s weaponization of U.S.C.I.S. reached new extremes. Anna was arrested as part of a new Department of Homeland Security policy in Minnesota called Operation PARRIS, a U.S.C.I.S. initiative that was created, according to a press release, because the state had become “ground zero for the war on fraud.” The targets of Operation PARRIS were some fifty-six hundred refugees who’d been vetted and admitted to the country by the Biden Administration. They had already gone through extensive interviews, background checks, and biometric scans. Yet U.S.C.I.S. officers were conducting their refugee interviews again, to look for grounds to strip them of their status retroactively. “No statute authorizes these warrantless arrests,” a group of lawyers led by the International Refugee Assistance Project wrote in a court filing challenging the policy. “ICE’s own guidance states that there is no authority to detain refugees merely because they have not yet adjusted their status.”

By law, a refugee has to wait a year before applying for a green card that confers permanent residency. The idea behind the operation was seemingly to impose a final roadblock; once someone has permanent residency it becomes much more difficult for the government to take it away. Around the time that the new operation was announced, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, ordered U.S.C.I.S. officials to draft a rule that would allow the Administration to cancel someone’s refugee status without providing the person with advance notice or an opportunity to respond. The agency’s director, Joe Edlow, was dispatched to Minnesota along with a deputy; almost three dozen other officers were being sent to the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, according to an internal agency document, to “conduct visits on employment-based immigration benefits” and “applications submitted by foreign students.”

Three days after arriving in Texas, Anna was interviewed by someone who told her that he was “in charge of immigration” and that they could “talk like they were friends.” According to a source with knowledge of the agency, the interviewer was likely an official at U.S.C.I.S. who worked in the fraud-detection unit. “He already knew everything about my story,” Anna told me. Yet his questions were confusingly disconnected. Did she want to be brought back to her home country? Why couldn’t she go home? Had she ever committed a crime? “I didn’t understand what these questions had to do with what was happening to me,” Anna said. “I was depressed. I was crying. What did I do to be here?”

The interview lasted three hours. Two days later, having still not received an explanation for why she was being detained, Anna was taken to the gate outside the facility and told she could go. It was up to her to figure out how to make it home to Minnesota. When we spoke, nearly two weeks later, she still didn’t have her immigration papers. The government had confiscated them.

Last year, approximately three hundred and fifty-two thousand civil servants left their jobs, fulfilling one of the Administration’s stated goals of dismantling the government bureaucracy and demoralizing the federal workforce. Roughly eighteen hundred of those employees were at U.S.C.I.S. “Re-engineering” the staff at the agency, five former officials recently wrote in a recent Newsweek op-ed, served “both as a goal in itself and as a means of reshaping the legal immigration system.”

It began, last February, with a seemingly mundane change. Since the pandemic, a large share of U.S.C.I.S. officials had been performing some configuration of hybrid or remote work. Within days of the President’s Inauguration, the agency’s staffers received the first of a series of directives instructing them to return to the office. But there was no accompanying plan to insure that everyone would have a place to work. “The agency had grown through telework that outpaced the agency’s footprint,” Kate Angustia, who worked in the chief counsel’s office, in Washington, told me. “There were lawyers with computers sitting on radiators and the floor, working in hallways and storage closets.” At an agency office in Chicago, the city fire marshal was called because of overcrowding. On February 13th, the agency’s networks crashed from overuse.

Edlow, the President’s pick to head the agency, was said to be skeptical of the back-to-office policy, but, because of the slow nomination process, it would be seven months before he officially took over. In the meantime, a group of ideologues inside the agency were elevated to the role of senior advisers in its top office. “Most of the people who were picked came from the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate,” Sarah Pierce, who worked in the agency’s Office of Policy and Strategy at the time, told me. Fraud Detection and National Security was one of U.S.C.I.S.’s seven internal divisions. During Trump’s first term, its budget grew substantially, doubling for fraud detection and tripling for national security. But it still had a reputation for being populated by people who, a former staffer said, “felt like they were not part of the agency and had a chip on their shoulder.”

In the past, the early months of a new Administration had been a period of transition at U.S.C.I.S. while personnel waited for a new director to be sworn in. This time, a rash of policies began immediately. Some of the activity was a consequence of the President signing a series of executive orders on the first day of his term to halt the refugee-resettlement program and suspend asylum at the southern border. Rob Law, a senior counsellor at the department, was closely aligned with Miller, who’d openly clashed with high-ranking U.S.C.I.S. personnel during Trump’s first term. “Miller’s turning U.S.C.I.S. into an enforcement arm is making it seem like the reason we have an immigration system is to keep people out,” a former senior agency official told me.

Several policy priorities followed from Miller’s long-standing fixations, such as denying immigrants work authorization while their legal cases were pending and penalizing applicants who used public benefits. Pierce, whose portfolio included work on refugee and asylum services, was told that her office, by virtue of specializing in humanitarian relief, was undermining the President’s agenda. “I was asked to find data showing fraud in the asylum system—that most asylum cases are fraudulent or frivolous and that that’s why we shouldn’t be granting work authorization.” When her research contradicted the premise, she was chastised for failing to come up with enough evidence. “The referral and denial numbers for fraud alone were exceedingly low,” Pierce said. “This raised a significant red flag for the Office of Chief Counsel, since the entire premise of the regulatory changes was that fraud was high.” (An agency spokesperson said, “Immigration fraud represents an existential threat to our nation.”)

A group of agency insiders proved willing to carry out the Administration’s orders to restrict immigration through U.S.C.I.S. Michael McDermott and Nicolas Bartell, two career officials, were named senior advisers in the director’s office and for a time effectively ran the agency. McDermott, who began working at U.S.C.I.S. in 2013, had extensive experience investigating allegations of fraud in the agency’s visa programs. Near the end of Trump’s first term, he was assigned to a special detail at ICE; when he returned to U.S.C.I.S., it was to work in the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. His view, many colleagues felt, was ideological, whereas Bartell’s seemed more opportunistic. He had led the agency’s field office in Montgomery, Alabama, before moving to the director’s office during the Biden years. Most of his colleagues left the office during the transition to Trump’s second term, but he told them he was staying, “for continuity.” In meetings, however, he would often laugh and make quips about how Biden’s policies were coming to an end. (Bartell, who did not respond to a request for comment, is currently stationed in Minnesota, running Operation PARRIS.)

“These were people seeking personal vendettas with personal pet projects,” Sarah Krieger, who worked in the Office of Policy and Strategy, told me. According to multiple sources, McDermott and Bartell attacked anyone who disagreed with them and dismissed legal analysis that didn’t immediately validate their positions. (The agency spokesperson said these claims were “baseless smear attacks against career public servants” whose “work has been exemplary.”) They also wanted to go further than the President’s Day One orders by limiting humanitarian visas and ending policies such as “deferred action,” which was supposed to protect from arrest people whose applications had passed a preliminary review but were still pending in the agency backlog.

Typically, when the agency changed a policy, staff would prepare a “decision memo,” in which different offices shared their views. Lawyers at the Office of Policy and Strategy were frequently told to remove their findings from the main text of agency documents and include them as an addendum. “A senior adviser would walk a memo over to an attorney and say, ‘You have ten minutes. Tell me if this is legally sufficient, and don’t tell anyone you looked at this,’ ” Krieger said. At one point, when she told McDermott that one of his demands contradicted an existing statute and might be at odds with the agency’s stance in pending litigation, he responded, “We don’t care what the statute says. We don’t care about court orders, and we don’t care about litigation risk.” (McDermott did not respond to a request for comment.)

Looming over the agency, meanwhile, was the threat of layoffs. Throughout the winter and early spring, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was slashing the federal workforce, in part, by offering buyouts to career officials. At the same time, the White House Office of Management and Budget was beginning to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants to make them easier to fire. In April, Kristi Noem, the D.H.S. Secretary, sent an e-mail to department staff titled “Reshaping the DHS Workforce,” in which she gave career officials the option of offering their resignations or opting for an early retirement. Many staffers at U.S.C.I.S. were particularly nervous about getting fired, because they were generally considered to be pro-immigrant and therefore hostile to Trump. During the 2024 campaign, a right-wing organization called the American Accountability Foundation—with ties to the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the authors of Project 2025—prepared for a second Trump Presidency by publishing the names and profiles of individual department staffers who might be disloyal; their information is accessible on a site called The D.H.S. Watchlist.

“Our bosses were pushing us to be more anti-immigrant and not to fight for small wins,” Pierce told me. “They were, like, ‘We need to keep a seat at the table.’ ” At meetings with political appointees, staffers were encouraged to describe their work as combating fraud in the immigration system. Those who disagreed with McDermott and Bartell, or who expressed anything short of unadulterated enthusiasm for the Administration’s new policies, were accused of leaking plans to the press and blocking the President’s agenda. E-mails and calls made to anyone outside the agency had to be “logged” in a spreadsheet, with a corresponding explanation of who had initiated the exchange. In one case, involving a dubious report about “special immigrant juveniles” who were suspected of being gang members, a group of agency officials weighed in using the standard protocol: they noted their reservations on the decision memo that was circulated within the agency. A few months later, they were called in to be polygraphed. This quickly became a pattern. The stories of a half-dozen staffers who’d been subjected to hours-long polygraphs spread inside the agency. Almost all of them had worked in offices that handled humanitarian benefits. Officials who refused to be polygraphed were put on administrative leave; one of them was seen being escorted out of the building by security guards. “That’s when it got really scary,” Krieger said. “We knew it could happen to anybody at any time. The choice was to get polygraphed or lose your job.”

The interviews began with the officials being Mirandized and told that their responses were under oath, which raised the possibility that they might later be charged with perjury. Yet the questions seemed inexplicably broad and subjective. One was whether the officials had ever lied, either to people close to them or to someone in a position of authority. “There wasn’t even a guise that this was about suspected leaks,” one of the former officials told me. Krieger said, “People left not because they had anything to hide but because they were afraid of how what they said could be used against them.”

Juan and his wife got married last June, in San Diego. They had met in high school, in 2021. She was a U.S. citizen; Juan, who was born in Mexico, wasn’t. He had arrived in the U.S. with his parents when he was twelve, and had never left. “A lot of ICE protests were going on in L.A. when we got married,” he told me recently. “My wife was, like, ‘I’m afraid that something might happen to you. Let’s start doing the process to get your residency. I don’t want them to take you from me.’ ”

The spouses and parents of citizens and permanent residents can apply for a green card through U.S.C.I.S., even if they have overstayed a visa or fallen out of status themselves. This has been the case for decades. But last November, about a week before Juan’s appointment, he received a call from his lawyer, who said that he’d heard the government was arresting people at the U.S.C.I.S. office in downtown San Diego. “He said he didn’t yet have a client arrested but that there was a chance,” Juan told me. “We were scared. But if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen either way.”

Juan and his wife scheduled an interview at a federal building in downtown San Diego. The session seemed completely prosaic. A female U.S.C.I.S. officer asked how they’d met and explained the paperwork that the couple would have to file in the future. “She told me, ‘You’re being approved,’ ” he said. “I felt peace. It all happened.”

Then the woman stood up from her desk as though she were stepping out to use the bathroom. “There are two other officers here who want to ask you questions,” she told him as she left the office. Two ICE officers in jeans and flannel shirts walked in. “Do you know why we’re here?” one of them asked. “No,” Juan replied. He’d assumed that they were part of U.S.C.I.S., following up to confirm basic details about his green-card application. The officer continued, “You came in with a visa that’s now expired, so you’re illegal here. We’re going to arrest you.”

At U.S.C.I.S., staff had begun to hear about such arrests as early as last June. “They were just arresting people who didn’t have arrest records,” Kate Angustia, from the chief counsel’s office, told me. “In the past, for people who were married to U.S. citizens, Congress had a statute in place: if they overstayed a visa, it was waivable. Now everyone is a lame duck.” By the fall, individual field offices, in their eagerness to fulfill the Administration’s wider mission, were beginning to arrest not just green-card applicants but asylum seekers who were showing up for administrative hearings and biometrics appointments.

A leaked field-office memo provided “instructions” for how U.S.C.I.S. officers should coördinate with ICE to entrap people. “Please provide an update approximately thirty minutes before the anticipated end of the interview,” it read. “ICE will be walked into your office, once you state that you are 5 minutes from concluding the interview.”

Juan was led to a white van in the building’s parking lot. He was handcuffed and had a chain placed around his waist, but the ICE officers, he told me, were “super chill.” One of them told him, “You’ll be O.K. This is the process now.” He waited in the van for five hours while the officers went back inside to arrest more people. Eventually Juan was joined by four or five others, and they were driven to an immigration jail along the border. “The officers who took us there were telling us that we were just numbers, that we were easy targets.” Two weeks later, after a bond hearing, he was released.

His attorney, Jan Bejar, has been practicing immigration law in the San Diego area for forty-two years. “We’re talking thousands of clients,” he told me in December. “Never in my life have I had to deal with this.” Juan and his wife had already paid U.S.C.I.S. roughly two thousand dollars to get his green card, and had to fight his detention case anyway. “They go fishing in an aquarium, and they say, ‘Look how many fish we caught,’ ” Bejar said, of the government.

Juan’s case was hardly an isolated incident. In mid-December, I spoke with Jeremy Lower, a thirty-three-year-old maintenance technician from Ohio who had gone with his wife, a Mexican national, to a U.S.C.I.S. office, in Cleveland, for a preliminary green-card interview. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and Lower had taken the day off from work. “We were going to celebrate,” he said. “We’d been waiting for this day for two and a half years.” The officer conducted their interviews separately, so Lower was in the waiting room when two ICE officers took his wife into custody. “She was told she was being deported,” he told me. By the end of the day, the government had flown her to a detention center in Texas, and the couple’s lawyer had to intervene to halt her removal. She spent a month in detention before being released, which was especially puzzling given the fact that Lower had checked on the status of his wife’s U.S.C.I.S. petition the day she was taken into custody. It had been approved.

In April, Sarah Krieger received an e-mail about a trafficking victim, who had recently been arrested by ICE. The woman, who’d been a witness for the prosecution in an ongoing case, had applied for a temporary benefit known as a T visa, which confers legal protection to trafficking victims who coöperate with federal law enforcement. She had waited more than six months, but hadn’t received a notice from U.S.C.I.S. acknowledging receipt of her application. “There are thousands of applications that are sitting unopened in regional offices because so many staff have left the agency,” Krieger told me. “Literally boxes in mailrooms.” Krieger managed to find the woman’s application and sent an agency receipt to ICE. She was deported anyway.

Last October, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of at least eight immigrants who had applied for visas as victims of trafficking, criminal acts, or gender-based violence. Because of processing delays that could take years, the Biden Administration created a policy that allowed for a preliminary review of a person’s case file to determine if they were a “bona fide” applicant; if so, U.S.C.I.S. gave them a special designation for deferred action, meaning that they wouldn’t be arrested while their application was pending. “Now U.S.C.I.S. simply refuses to look at the application,” Sarah Kahn, a lawyer at the center, told me.

Even those whose applications U.S.C.I.S. had reviewed during the past Administration were being arrested—this was the specific basis for the center’s lawsuit. In late December, I spoke on the phone with one of the plaintiffs, Jackie Merlos, a forty-four-year-old Honduran mother of four U.S. citizens who’s lived in the country with her husband for the past twenty-two years. In March, 2024, the couple was sitting on their porch, in Portland, Oregon, when a burglar, who was trying to break into a truck across the street, threatened them at gunpoint. They reported him to the police and coöperated with the ensuing investigation, which qualified them for a so-called U visa. That December, the agency finally conducted a preliminary review of Merlos’s application and determined it was “bona fide.” Last June, however, she and her children were arrested and jailed in Washington State. For two weeks, her children—a seven year-old and nine-year-old triplets—were held with her, despite being U.S. citizens themselves. “You’re here because you’re a criminal,” an agent had told her in front of her kids. “He just wanted to get rid of us,” she told me. It would be four months before she was finally released on bond. By then, the construction business she ran with her husband had closed. “I barely leave the house now,” she said.

Late last year, when I started speaking to current and former agency officials, the President announced that the government was indefinitely pausing all asylum and green-card applications from Afghanistan and eighteen other countries. At the time, an Afghan national who’d worked with American forces in the country before getting asylum in the U.S. had allegedly shot two National Guard troops in D.C. The Administration immediately moved to exploit the tragedy. Individual acts of wrongdoing became the pretext for the vilification of entire nationalities. Operation PARRIS, for example, began in the wake of a scandal in Minnesota, in which some eighty Somali Americans were found to be defrauding the state’s public benefits system.

At U.S.C.I.S., the targeting of specific nationalities wasn’t a matter of mere rhetoric but actual policy. Earlier this year, the Administration announced that it was indefinitely pausing green-card applications for people from seventy-five countries. By law, there are roughly two hundred and twenty-six thousand green cards issued each year to the adult children and siblings of current citizens as well as spouses and minor children of permanent residents; if these green cards aren’t used, they are reassigned to a different branch of the system tied to employment-based benefits. “The administration has always hated family-based immigration,” the former senior U.S.C.I.S. official told me. “Most employment-based green cards go to people who are already here.” It remains to be seen whether U.S.C.I.S. will apply the unused green cards to the employment side of the system this year. If it doesn’t, the green cards will be lost permanently. Whittling away the core functions of the agency has starved U.S.C.I.S. of the bureaucratic capacity it once had. “If they want, they can just be ‘unprepared to process’ ” the leftover green cards, the official said.

Meanwhile, the White House has called on U.S.C.I.S. to initiate between a hundred and two hundred “denaturalization” cases each month, which consists of stripping naturalized citizens of their existing legal status. Miller had pushed a similar but far less ambitious agenda during Trump’s first term, but it failed to materialize, largely because of legal constraints. (The government had filed a hundred and two denaturalization cases in the entirety of the first Trump Administration, according to figures from the Justice Department.) “Once you naturalize, the file gets ‘retired’ ” and sent to the National Records Center, Krieger told me. “Files are hard to find.” The obvious question, multiple sources told me, is where U.S.C.I.S. officials would even begin the denaturalization process. “You’re going to have to pick some characteristic to be the basis for calling up these files and scrutinizing them,” one of them told me. “Probably they’ll just go down a list, and start going country by country, targeting people from each one.” ♦

Hey, team, thanks so much for joining. Given everything that’s happening in the world right now, upper management have decided that we in middle management needed to create a space of support. And so, we have gathered here today, on Zoom, to support you, our hardworking teammates, in this brand-new meeting series we are calling “Team Support Space.”

It’s a lot out there right now. So many bad things are happening every day. It can be difficult not to succumb to fear, sloth, gluttony—take your pick! And let’s not forget hate. There’s so much hate—self-hatred included, believe me.

In that global context, community is vital. During times like these, we, your colleagues, are here for you. If you come away from this meeting with only one thing, make it this: No matter where you sit on the political spectrum or what your beliefs are, this organization welcomes and supports each and every one of you. We support you so much that we are specifically allocating valuable company time to do so.

Before I open it up to you all for sharing and receiving support, I want to lay down some ground rules and guidelines. These are being set forth by both middle management and the employee-experience department, formerly known by the dehumanizing moniker “human resources.” You are so much more than resources to be mined by this organization. All of us, at all levels of management, know and respect that. And, to that end, your employee-experience team and middle management have developed three simple frameworks to make the best use of this space and time.

First, in the interest of everyone’s psychological safety, in our discussion today, let’s not get too specific about our political stances. Or even which of the many challenges facing the world you are referring to during your share. Does your anxiety or stress have to do with the climate—political or environmental? Does it have to do with a war—literal or figurative, as in, “the war on X topic” or “the war in Z location”? Who can know? No one. We won’t know unless you tell us. So, don’t tell us.

The employee-experience team has kindly offered a list of phrases they have found helpful that you can leverage. These will be pinned in the chat and also sent in a follow-up e-mail. You can say “the state of the world today,” “the way things are,” “the moment we’re living in,” or simply, “the times.” Though I might strike that last one, actually. I wouldn’t want it to seem like you were mentioning a publication that may or may not have a particular political leaning. Regardless, you get my meaning. Strategic wording is mandatory in this discussion and sharing space today. The first principle of the team support space is: Vague Is Virtuous. It’s for everyone’s protection that we advise this.

But for our time here to be well spent, you must allow your feelings to surface. That is how healing happens. Too many of our best and brightest have been overheard crying in bathroom stalls or have abruptly gone off-camera in the middle of a meeting, clearly overwhelmed. It’s not good for anyone. Not for you or for upper and middle management. Bringing your whole selves to work means bringing a truckload of emotions. We have accepted this. There are the emotions we love, like your determination and your passion. But also the pesky ones, like your terror and your existential dread. We want this space to be one where all of you can express and process your unproductive emotions. And, to be clear, we want you to do it together, in one hyperconcentrated period of time.

Yes, spaces like this can be awkward. You may be apprehensive about expressing your feelings in front of each other at a pre-scheduled bi-monthly get-together. But to help you overcome those anxieties, keep in mind Principle No. 2: Emote When Efficient. We know that you all deeply value efficiency—it being one of the founding values approved by our board of directors. So, when in doubt, close your eyes, take a deep breath, think of the board, and express yourself. This is the place to do that in the most efficient and effective way possible. The employee-experience team is here for you. Please let it all out now and not later.

Our third principle is crucial. While this organization has its flaws and has no doubt contributed to your mental decline in various ways, that is not what this space is for. I am preëmpting any potential tangent about organizational issues because they’re real. I myself have certainly felt frustrated with this place, even as recently as five minutes before I kicked off this meeting. I get it. But hear me when I say that this space does not have the capacity for repair conversations. Please see the employee-efficiency team if you would like to schedule an organizational-issue repair conversation, as those are best done in private and not in the team support space. Hence Principle No. 3: Repair Elsewhere.

Of course, this meeting is entirely optional. Or perhaps it’s not, depending on your most recent performance evaluation. Let me look into that. For now, let’s get started! Given that this session was scheduled for fifteen minutes, we now have about five minutes left for sharing. Unless you’d like me to give you some time back. Actually, scratch that. Even if no one is ready to share, we can still hold this space for each other in silent support.

Alright, team, let’s do this! Who’d like to kick us off? ♦

Is this Waymo a better person than you? You don’t want to make assumptions, but it did come to a complete stop at the stop sign. Not a California stop—a stop during which time actually passes. You feel this, and experience a slight internal recalibration, like when someone else puts their shopping cart back and you realize you’d been hoping that no one would notice that you hadn’t.

This Waymo seems comfortable with ambiguity. You are not. When a pedestrian approaches the crosswalk, the Waymo slows—even though the pedestrian hasn’t fully committed. They’re sort of hovering, looking at their phone. They might cross. They might continue scrolling. If you were driving, you’d have spent the rest of the afternoon experiencing low-grade irritation at the pedestrian.

And when the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in “probably.” It waits. Behind you, a human driver honks. The Waymo absorbs this without flinching. You feel the honk deep in your shoulder muscles.

Another car cuts in front of you. The Waymo brakes. It does not then surge forward to assert dominance. It does not briefly consider engaging in Reddit-sourced novice witchcraft to place a curse on the person who has wronged you. You imagine honking in a way that would feel educational but is actually just rage with a thesis statement.

You frequently tell yourself that you don’t text and drive. This Waymo requires no such reassurance. What you mean is that you text at red lights because it “doesn’t count,” and also once while moving because there was an extenuating circumstance—you had to fire off a killer joke in the group chat before the conversation moved on. Timing is everything. Safety, you reason, is more flexible.

And what about the time it parked perfectly between two lines on the first try, despite you having spent your entire life contorting to fit in—socially, emotionally, and physically? You resent the Waymo for being able to execute maneuvers with a grace that you do not possess. This Waymo is not programmed to spiral into an existential crisis. It does not replay its performance in slow motion while imagining all the ways in which it could have done better. You, meanwhile, have already composed a running commentary on today’s failures, and it’s only 2:47 P.M.

This Waymo has never hit the road, having forgotten that it took an edible an hour ago. It signals before turning, even when no one is around to notice. It merges seamlessly into traffic, adjusting its speed with gentle confidence. You once apologized to a squirrel you didn’t even hit.

When you arrive at your destination, the Waymo pulls up with the effortless dignity of an elegant woman whose taste has been honed over decades, who swirls a giant glass of Bordeaux in bed while scrolling on her iPad, and doesn’t spill a drop. You step out, grateful, but vaguely ashamed. The Waymo remains where it is, having completed its task correctly and without ego.

Still, it’s worth noting that, when the power goes out, the Waymo stalls where it is, while you, somehow, keep going. ♦